I was glad to see that, at least for the moment, Debbie could keep it all in perspective. “Sounds great to me. I wonder what sort of lecture you're in for tomorrow?” She looked at me as though I'd set her up. “I swear, I had nothing to do with this, and I know nothing.”
The next morning, we pulled into the parking lot and I led Debbie to the front door.
“Dumpy place.”
“Be quiet!” I scolded. I opened the door and shouted from the entrance, “Hello, everybody! Debbie's here with me. If you have anything on your desk she shouldn't see, you'd better put it away. She has instructions from the Kremlin to photograph everybody's desktop.”
Jenny laughed. “Make sure you get a shot of Pratt's desk. I want to send it to the
Guinness Book of World Records
for the Trashiest Desktop in the Known World category.”
“Ah, Mrs. Morehouse.” Levy scurried out of his office.
“Welcome! Can I get you some coffee or tea? Anything?”
Debbie offered him her hand. “No, thank you. I'm afraid David is the only member of our family who drinks it.” She glared at me. Mormons aren't supposed to drink coffee, but I'd picked up the habit in the infantry.
“Well, I think we should get started, then. David, I believe you have some lectures to attend. If you will kindly loan me your wife for a few minutes, she and I have some things to discuss.” He motioned Debbie toward his office door and followed her in, closing the door behind.
It wasn't until years later that Debbie told me what happened. Levy began by thanking her for coming in on such short notice, then said: “I asked you to come here because I want to talk to you about David. Please don't be alarmed; this has been standard procedure for some time now. Our psychologists feel it's important to let the family know exactly what is going on with the service member and what might happen to him.”
“Please do tell me what could happen to my service member, Mr. Levy.”
“Yes, I'm sorry. I'm trying to find the proper wordsâ”
Debbie interrupted, smiling politely. “I assure you, the proper words in this case will be the truth about what my husband is involved in and what might potentially happen to him. Please continue.”
“I see. Well, then. I'll be blunt. What we do here is select and train people in a very unusual intelligence-collection method. We call our staff viewers. The training usually takes anywhere from twelve to eighteen months, but I believe that David will become operational much sooner. He is doing remarkably well.” Levy paused and looked away. “The training is rigorous, and the emotional makeup of those being trained is very fragile. So I'm constantly on the prowl for variables in the trainee's day-to-day routine that might make the training more difficult or perhaps more dangerous. I'm aware of your husband's frequent nightmares. While they present no immediate cause for alarm, I
want you to know that I believe they eventually will.”
“In what way?”
“First, I want you to understand that David promises to be one of the very best viewers we've ever produced. But he is extremely vulnerable to outside influences.”
“You're talking about me, aren't you?”
“Yesâbut please don't be offended; that's not my purpose in bringing you here. It is also not the only thing I'm concerned about. I think that the visions David is having suggest that many of the conduits normally left closed at birth have been damaged in some way. They have been forced open and are not reclosable. While that will make him a natural and excellent remote viewer, he will also be operating in a way, and in a world, very foreign to him. David is not what I would call the usual remote-viewing personality. He is accepting of the training, but very confused about the visions. I think he believes that we will make them stop. I'm afraid the opposite is true. The more capable a viewer he becomes, the more frequent his contact with the ether will be, and the more chances for spillover through the âconduits.'”
“What you are telling me is that he runs the risk of not being able to tell where reality stops and the ether begins.”
“Exactly; you're very astute. Now, this curse is also a blessing.”
“I tend to think of it as a curse.”
“Well, that is true only if you limit David by the usual definition of normality. He is an exceptional human being; he will only become more exceptional. If he has your understanding, and if you help him establish and keep a solid belief structure, then I think we can minimize the negative impact. However, if he doesn't have your support, I would fearâI'd
expect
âthe worst.”
“I have to be honest, Mr. Levy: I don't want him here at all. I want him to get professional help at a hospital, with doctors who know what to do for someone like him.”
Levy leaned forward. “I'll tell you what the doctors will do. They will very carefully document his descriptions of
the visions, perhaps even ask him to draw sketches. They will put him through some simple tests. They will classify him as delusional, maybe even psychotic. And then they will prescribe all sorts of drugs. They will want to control his visions with a chemical straitjacket. They will not be understanding; they will not care; and his career will be over. The best you could hope for would be a medical discharge for psychological disability. Not a very fitting end to an otherwise exceptional career, is it?”
“Maybe that's not what they'd do! Maybe they'd find a cure for what happened to him. The bullet must have caused some damage. Maybe they can find it and correct it.”
“Mrs. Morehouse, you're being far too optimistic. When it comes to the psychology of its soldiers, the army is downright archaic. They won't understand what is wrong with David, because there's nothing visibly wrong with him. We gave him a CAT scan at Bethesda three weeks ago; there is nothing medically wrong with him. They can't cut into his brain and take something out, or move something over and stitch it up again. Please try to understand what I'm telling you.”
“I do.” Debbie's eyes filled with tears. “I don't know what to do anymore. I have no options. All I can do is hope that you give him the tools to live with this thing. That's all I have. They took my husband from me, and I have no one to call upon, no one to help me.”
“I'll help you.”
“No! No, Mr. Levy, I beg to differ. You are not helping me. What you are doing is using my husband's sickness to your advantage. I can't say I fault you for it, but I'll allow you to do it only because I haven't any recourse. I'm against a wall in a very small box, so you can use David and I'll back you up. But don't you
ever
expect me to thank you for it. Good day, Mr. Levy.”
Debbie stormed out without speaking to anyone else. I was already in the other building with Mel. Over the next two years Levy never mentioned the meeting to me; when
I
asked, he avoided the issue. I didn't find out what happened that day until Debbie told me, in June of 1993.
Â
“I want to introduce you to the concept of time,” Riley began. I was distracted, wondering how Debbie was faring with Levy. “Don't worry about Debbie,” he snapped. “She's a big girl and she can take care of herself. You pay attention, okay?”
“Sorry.”
How the hell does he know what I'm thinking all the time?
“Connelly Wilsonâwho's dead, by the wayâand Doctor Michael Rendell, an experimental laser physicist at Stanford Research Institute ⦠Remember him? We talked about him several weeks ago.”
“He was one of the first researchers, along with Dr. Harold Puthoff and some others.”
“That's right. Well, the pair did some experimental work on time travel from a viewer's perspective. They weren't interested in actual travel, only in the ability of the viewer to project himself forward and backward along the time-space continuum. I want you to think of this continuum for a moment as linear. It isn't, really, but we're not going into theory. So just think of it as linear, likeâ”
“A fire hose?”
“Okay, like a fire hose. There are three critical points relevant to the viewer: past, present, and future time. Past time is easy; it's locked in and doesn't change. When you travel backward in time to a designated target, you are viewing that target as you would a snapshot. You can select any place, person, thing, or event connected to that snapshot, and view it. Everything about that instant in time will remain, infinitely. Every emotion, pain, thought, personality, horror, event, deathâeverything remains. Viewing the past is like opening an encyclopedia of the period, including all the relevant intangibles and aesthetics. A well-trained viewer can experience pain, temperature, everything. Can suck it right out.
“Present time is locked, too: you cannot change it; you
can only experience it.” He paused. “Well, Lyn is heading up some research on influencing present time, but you needn't concern yourself with that for now.
“Rendell and Wilson were experimenting with future time. They were convinced that Wilson could move forward in time to view events that had not yet occurred. Rendell asked him to explore the probability of a future event, and Wilson did that with a high degree of accuracy.”
“Okay, hold on. Look, I know we haven't talked about viewing into the future, but since you brought it upâwell, I don't doubt what you're telling me. But I don't understand how he could view into the future with any degree of accuracy.”
Riley gave me a sidelong look. “What do you mean, âwith any degree of accuracy'?”
“I mean just thatâaccuracy! How can you look into the future with any accuracy? I don't see how results could be valid.”
“I still don't see your point,” Riley said, taking a seat.
“I'm sorry, I don't have the vocabulary for this. Let me see if I can find another way to put it.” I thought for a moment. “All right: as I understand it, when we tap into the unconscious mind, we are, in a sense, tapping into the time-space continuum; right so far?”
“So far, yes.”
“Then looking into the future means identifying a point in time, somewhere along this continuum, right?”
“Still right.”
I went to the chalkboard and drew a straight horizontal line across it. “Okay, this represents time, all right?” Placing a dot on the line's far left, I labeled it “A.” “This represents present time.” Mel nodded. “So, if I remote-view a
future
event, that means I'm accessing a point somewhere out here.” I placed a dot halfway along the line, to the right of “A,” and labeled it “B.” “Let's say this represents that point in future time.”
“Go on.”
“Well, the future isn't locked, is it? Doesn't it fluctuate
in accordance with the variables that affect it?”
“No, it isn't locked, but we can still see forward in time.”
“But the future is directly tied to countless variables. Wilson may have seen accurately into the future, but I submit that that was an aberration.”
“Why?”
“Because there must be too many opportunities for events to be skewed between âA' and âB.' In the time it takes one of us to write up a report about what we saw out there, the event we were looking at could change a million times.”
Riley sat in his chair frowning in thought. “So if I asked you, as a viewer, to tell me if there would be an assassination attempt on the life of the President next month, and you said yesâthen I should pay no attention to it?”
I sighed. “What I'm saying is that it's a fifty-fifty chance that you'll be right. You might as well flip a coin. That's why your garden-variety street and television psychic isn't winning the lottery, isn't protecting the President, because predicting the future is just guesswork.”
“It's not a guess; they're seeing into the future.”
“Without a doubt, yes, they are seeing into the future. But the data can't be reliable! Too much happens between âA' and âB.' So if someone predicts an assassination attempt on the President, I say it changes nothing. The Secret Service still has to operate, every second, of every hour, of every day, as though an attempt were imminent. A remote viewer's data or a psychic's visions should change nothing.”
I could see that Riley wanted to get back to Rendell and Wilson, so I said, “Look, you're the professor here, let's get back to the lecture.”
Riley smiled. “Questioning theory is how we get better at what we do. Don't ever stop questioning the method or the data; the day that happens, you might as well start writing science fiction novels, because that's all you'll get for a product. Well done!”
I
don't really know where my outburst came from; I just knew I was right. Viewers can't accurately predict the future; they can only describe a snapshot in time, as yet unaffected by the events of life. Riley knew that, too; he'd just wanted to see if I'd figure it out. It was a test and, thank God, I passed.